Oracle invests heavily in AI: key announcements and visions from Oracle AI World

Oracle has renamed its annual flagship conference AI World, and this year's event in Las Vegas underscored the company's massive commitment to artificial intelligence. The announcements range from foundational infrastructure to new AI-powered applications, signaling a clear strategy to integrate AI into all layers of the technology stack.

Here's a summary of some of the most important news:

1. Oracle AI Database 26ai: The database gets smarter One of the most pivotal launches was Oracle AI Database 26ai. This new version builds on previous AI capabilities with deeper integration of machine learning algorithms and new generative AI capabilities, allowing enterprises to build AI applications directly into the database. 26ai is available now and there is an easy path to upgrade from 23ai with a patch or from other versions directly with an upgrade.

2. Continuous Innovation in the Cloud - Driven by Customers A common theme was how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is continuously improved through close collaboration with customers who push the platform to the limit. This is very reminiscent of how Exadata has progressively improved, year on year, based on real customer needs. Clay Magouyrk's keynote, "Building the Cloud for You", focused on just that - building a cloud based on customer requirements for performance, cost and security. Partnerships with giants like OpenAI and ByteDance (TikTok), which require enormous scale for their AI models, are forcing innovation at an unprecedented pace, resulting in a more robust and capable platform for all OCI customers. Not to mention Acceleron, Oracle's new solution to further enhance the OCI network in terms of both performance and security.

3. Zettascale10: The World's Largest AI Supercomputer In partnership with NVIDIA, Oracle unveiled Zettascale10, which they claim is the world's largest AI supercomputer. This massive infrastructure is designed to train the most advanced AI models and is a key part of OpenAI's "Stargate" supercluster.

4. Multicloud Universal Credits: Flexibility across clouds To simplify the use of database services across different cloud platforms, Oracle launched Multicloud Universal Credits. This licensing model allows customers to use their Oracle credits across OCI and with competitors such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

5. More Low-Code/Vibe going forward: APEX at the center of the strategy There is a lot of anticipation around the next version of APEX, and the conference confirmed the strategic importance of the platform to Oracle. The demos shown were impressive, and the most telling example of Oracle's confidence in the platform is the ongoing modernization of Cerner, their massive health records system. Larry Ellison confirmed that the entire Cerner system is being rewritten, bit by bit, using APEX. This shows that Oracle is investing heavily in its own low-code platform for its most critical business applications.

The experience from the Keynotes: Vision and Strategy

CTO Larry Ellison's visionary look: Larry Ellison's keynote was characterized by big visions and a belief that AI will solve some of humanity's most pressing problems. He gave a short primer on AI, and he emphasized Oracle's unique position: "Most of the world's valuable data already exists in Oracle databases." His central message was that Oracle is making this data safely available to AI models, allowing them to reason and find solutions we previously couldn't see.

Clay Magouyrks - one of two new CEOs: In contrast to Ellison's grand visions, Clay Magouyrks, as head of OCI, delivered a more down-to-earth and strategic keynote. His focus was on how Oracle is building a different, more high-performance and cost-effective cloud. He presented OCI as a flexible and customer-centric platform, built to win with enterprises - whether they need massive AI solutions or small, secure, national cloud environments. I particularly appreciated the presentation because this is someone who really understands technology and has been central to building their Gen 2 Cloud.

Overall, the announcements and keynotes from Oracle AI World show that Oracle is back on track. By combining visionary thinking with a solid engineering strategy, Oracle is positioning itself as a key player for businesses looking to adopt AI at scale.

For us, as an important Microsoft partner, this has shown us even more opportunities to use these two clouds simultaneously - also with GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and AWS.